AI bookkeeping software company Botkeeper is no longer. Over the weekend of February 7–8, in a post on its home page, the company announced that it was going out of business.

A well-known name in accounting circles, Botkeeper, founded in 2015, secured almost $90 million in funding from investors including Gradient Ventures, formerly part of Google. It hosted a conference called AI Unchained, was twice named to Inc. 5000’s Fastest Growing Companies lists, and boasted among its hundreds of clients Withum, the nation’s 22nd-largest accounting firm.

And it was known for innovation. Botkeeper “blazed a lot of new trails,” David Cieslak, a CPA and chief cloud officer and EVP at RKL eSolutions, and a frequent speaker on accounting software, told CFO Brew. Byron Patrick, a CPA and senior project manager at Karbon, and a Botkeeper employee from 2019–22, agreed. “Botkeeper, I think, was one of the earliest AI-focused tools in the profession,” Patrick told CFO Brew.

What went wrong? In a statement to the Botkeeper community, CEO and founder Enrico Palmerino blamed the company’s downfall on a “‘perfect storm’ of macro-economic shifts that arrived more swiftly than we could course-correct.” Toward the end of 2025, he said, it faced “a series of unexpected industry consolidation that significantly impacted our largest clients.”

Keep reading.—CV

The obvious story is the obvious story: CFOs are ready and eager to keep spending on tech.

That’s one takeaway—the obvious one—from Gartner’s latest budget benchmarks report, released in early February. It’s based on a survey of over 300 CFOs and finance leaders conducted in October 2025.

But look just past the obvious story, and there’s a thread other CFOs should pay attention to in 2026: HR spending is facing a noticeable pullback.

Just 29% of CFOs plan to increase HR spending in 2026, while 22% expect to cut HR budgets. That reduces “average budget growth from 2.4% in 2025 to 0.7% in 2026 due to reduced hiring and AI efficiency gains,” the report noted.

Meanwhile, “after years of compensation-led budget growth,” pay increases slowed for three cycles in a row, “dropping from 6.1% in 2024 to 5.4% in 2025, and the moderation will deepen to 4.5% in 2026,” according to the report.

Keep reading.—NP

If you had an activist investing comeback on your 2026 bingo card, you’re a winner.

As a refresher, activist investment firms make money by buying shares of a company, then using their power to pressure the board of directors to enact corporate restructuring and other changes they believe will result in a turnaround.

But this year, activist investors are not only ramping up the number of companies they’re taking stakes in, but ratcheting up the severity of their tactics, too.

Keep reading on Brew Markets.—LB

Skills gaps are widening across finance teams, with most leaders saying they need to upskill employees to meet 2026 priorities. Here’s where the biggest gaps are—and how companies are responding.